The Project

Hello everyone and welcome to the History of Greece podcast!

I decided to start this project as a method of studying for my Greek History comprehensive exam for my classics degree. I so enjoyed listening to Mike Duncan’s the History of Rome to study for my Roman history comprehensive that I was devastated when I was unable to find a similar project for Greek History.

Don’t get me wrong; there are a lot of great audio/video resources out there for Greek history. To name but a few, Professor Andrew Szegedy-Maszak from Wellsley’s Coursera class The Greeks (Coursera) as well as Professor Donald Kagan’s Introduction to Ancient Greek History (Yale). There are also classes by Professor Jeremy McInerney by The Teaching Company (The Great Courses). However, none of the classes are as extensive as the material that would be covered by my exam (and McInerney’s research seems somewhat dated). So, I decided to strike out on my own and make my own version.

However, my ambition to create a tool for studying quickly became a much larger and more extensive project (and one that I could not even begin while in the process of studying for big exams). Moreover, Greek history fascinated me; the more I learned the more I wanted to learn. Even when I finished my degree in classics and moved on to work in philosophy, I decided to continue with the project so that I could share the Greek history that fascinated me so much with the world.

I am not an expert in either history or archaeology. My background is in classics (primarily Ancient Greek literature) and philosophy. As such, I will not be able to present Greek history with the same depth and experience that a historian or archaeologist might. I have, however, done research into each of the topics that I present and I will do my best to  present the topic in thorough and engaging manner.

My plan is to post a podcast once a month. I hope that my schedule in graduate school will permit this pace to continue. In between, I will be posting the transcript and bibliography of the podcast as well as a set of supplementary resources.